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I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels (some of whom are inactive on this site outside of Winter Bash) bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

Or this example, where a clearly unanswerable question that was closed as a duplicate got edited and voted to reopen without any significant changes. All for another hat (180°).

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, is such behaviour helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?

NOTE: I have explicitly avoided mentioning any users and it is just a coincidence that both the above examples are from the same user - I could have included other trivial edits from other users as well. The question is NOT about one user or two but the generic behaviour.

EDIT The answer to the Meta.SE post pointed out by Eran in the comments promises a rework for next year and changes the triggers for this year's event:

For this year, to reduce the disruptiveness that the original hat definition has introduced, we have

 

• Reduced the requirement from 5 to 3 edits
• Changed the hat to trigger on editing of 3 questions on either meta or main sites

Which has propagated the phenomenon to Bricks.meta as well (this time the examples are from another user):

And here:

I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels (some of whom are inactive on this site outside of Winter Bash) bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

Or this example, where a clearly unanswerable question that was closed as a duplicate got edited and voted to reopen without any significant changes. All for another hat (180°).

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, is such behaviour helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?

NOTE: I have explicitly avoided mentioning any users and it is just a coincidence that both the above examples are from the same user - I could have included other trivial edits from other users as well. The question is NOT about one user or two but the generic behaviour.

EDIT The answer to the Meta.SE post pointed out by Eran in the comments promises a rework for next year and changes the triggers for this year's event:

For this year, to reduce the disruptiveness that the original hat definition has introduced, we have

• Reduced the requirement from 5 to 3 edits
• Changed the hat to trigger on editing of 3 questions on either meta or main sites

Which has propagated the phenomenon to Bricks.meta as well (this time the examples are from another user):

And here:

I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

Or this example, where a clearly unanswerable question that was closed as a duplicate got edited and voted to reopen without any significant changes. All for another hat.

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, are such edits helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?

NOTE: I have explicitly avoided mentioning any users and it is just a coincidence that both the above examples are from the same user - I could have included other trivial edits from other users as well. The question is NOT about one user or two but the generic behaviour.

I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels (some of whom are inactive on this site outside of Winter Bash) bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

Or this example, where a clearly unanswerable question that was closed as a duplicate got edited and voted to reopen without any significant changes. All for another hat (180°).

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, is such behaviour helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?

NOTE: I have explicitly avoided mentioning any users and it is just a coincidence that both the above examples are from the same user - I could have included other trivial edits from other users as well. The question is NOT about one user or two but the generic behaviour.

EDIT The answer to the Meta.SE post pointed out by Eran in the comments promises a rework for next year and changes the triggers for this year's event:

For this year, to reduce the disruptiveness that the original hat definition has introduced, we have

• Reduced the requirement from 5 to 3 edits
• Changed the hat to trigger on editing of 3 questions on either meta or main sites

Which has propagated the phenomenon to Bricks.meta as well (this time the examples are from another user):

And here:

I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, are such edits helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?

I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

Or this example, where a clearly unanswerable question that was closed as a duplicate got edited and voted to reopen without any significant changes. All for another hat.

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, are such edits helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?

NOTE: I have explicitly avoided mentioning any users and it is just a coincidence that both the above examples are from the same user - I could have included other trivial edits from other users as well. The question is NOT about one user or two but the generic behaviour.